Novell could have negotiated a patent peace concerning Mono between the whole of the community and Microsoft, instead they chose to just protect themselves.

Additionally Microsoft is no company you like to hand something which even allows them to FUD you out of the market.
And having all free Linux distros depending on Mono would allow Microsoft to FUD them.

Trying to keep Mono out of your core dependencies makes sense, because in the world of "big company vs. small company" lawsuits, having to enter the struggle usually is a defeat for the small company.

Novell could have negotiated a patent peace concerning Mono between the whole of the community and Microsoft, instead they chose to just protect themselves.

They could have but it makes no business sense to protect competing companies. We have to remember that we're talking about companies out to make a profit. Trusting them to protect anyone's interest but their own is naive.

And having all free Linux distros depending on Mono would allow Microsoft to FUD them.

How so? I think Mono only lends more credibility to .NET.

Trying to keep Mono out of your core dependencies makes sense, because in the world of "big company vs. small company" lawsuits, having to enter the struggle usually is a defeat for the small company.

If we always thought like that we would have ceded the entire software market to Microsoft a long time ago.

Trying to keep Mono out of your core dependencies makes sense, because in the world of "big company vs. small company" lawsuits, having to enter the struggle usually is a defeat for the small company.

Luckily (in the big picture), Mono still wouldn't be a core dependency for all of Linux desktop - just Gnome. We'll always have KDE. And it's mostly a dependency in name only, it could currently be fixed by just stripping a few apps and removing the dependency line from the metapackage.

I don't think the core Gnome devs would allow making it a dependency without which Gnome wouldn't run.

I too have a HUGE problem with gnuplot. It has some very useful plotting features, but because of their license, I can not modify or use any portion of it in my open source apps. Sure, I can use it as it is, and call it from the command line, but that is about it.

I think the name is extremely misleading, I wish the FSF would do something about a blatant use of the GNU name. Say I wrote some application, called "Fred", and I decided to call it "Microsoft Fred" you bet MS Layers would be all over me.

I think it is probably fair for any app released under GPL, or LGPL to call itself gnu****, but something that is for all intents and purposes closed source like gnuplot, certainly not.

that's not quite true.
Disclaimer: I'm a tomboy user and (very, very tiny) contributer. Let me just summarize your post from my pov:
You link to yet another "50MB too much" blog post that shows the pixel by pixel "ripoff" (Actually I don't have anything against GNote).
That's not the part of the news item that bugs me though. It's more that your personal opinion resonates very strongly in every line - and that's just a bad idea for several reasons.
a) I perceive this as a news site, not a personal blog.
b) The topic is already a sensitive one, you just add to the flames without more careful placed words.

That's not the part of the news item that bugs me though. It's more that your personal opinion resonates very strongly in every line - and that's just a bad idea for several reasons.

Well, I'm not even against Mono. I just don't care about it, have no feelings either way. The patent situation is worrying, but that's it. Kind of like Austria. I know it's there, but it just doesn't evoke any strong feelings.

The thing is, though, that Mono is an important topic among many of our readers, and as such, it is very much news when Debian includes it.

Actually, Thom's argument is pretty simple. Let me remove Tomboy and Gnote from the argument and just use the letters X and Y to avoid the emotions associated with Mono.

Suggestion: It is suggested that X should be replaced by Y as an option for GNOME, since Y has clear advantages, namely Y is available on more platforms than X and Y is smaller than X.

Actual Response: Make X required by GNOME unless you care enough to replace it with Y and know Y exists. On other platforms were X doesn't run, make Y required.

What the response should have been is one of the following:
Option 1) Replace Y with X as an *option* for GNOME
Option 2) Leave X as an *option* for GNOME on supported platforms. Make Y an option for GNOME on other platforms.

Both of these options would have been acceptable, but the actual response demonstrates that the suggestion was just an excuse to push X forward.

Personally, I don't know why anyone would want to use either Tomboy or GNote and I have no idea why either would be a recommended dependency, so I'd likely want to just remove both from the default if I were the maintainer....but I'd be guilty of the same bias of Debian maintainer, which is something that a strong meritocracy like Debian cannot tolerate if it wishes to remain as relevant as it is.

You link to yet another "50MB too much" blog post that shows the pixel by pixel "ripoff" (Actually I don't have anything against GNote).

GNote is not a Tomboy ripoff. It's a port to a less demanding framework.
Red Hat did a similar thing with OpenOffice years ago (porting its Java bits to GCJ and compile it natively) and nobody cried. The result is faster startup time and less RAM is required. These are benefits on all platforms, not just the ones that don't have a Java VM.

What the hell are you talking about? There is nothing anti-mono in the blog post at all. That it was moved to depends is exactly the point everyone is unhappy about. You make it sound as if that is meaningless and as if no one understood that. I am totally amazed by your post.

and other distributions like Fedora are replacing Tomboy for Gnote as default (Fedora 12) because it will be nice to have a note taking application on the LiveCD and Tomboy dependencies are too much for a CD

I'm but a humble Deb user slowly learning the deeper political details of the distro; late Etch and Lenny since so my experience is limited.

For me, two things keep it from being my desktop OS along side my server OS. Wifi NIC support and dependencies. What can you do, I accept that source availability is a goal of the distro. But, I come from Mandriva where I can "urpmi konsole" and get only what is needed for KDE to push Konsole. The everything KDE (or Gnome) as a dependency of KDE (or Gnome) really turns me off as a result. I don't want all of KDE but only specific core components. Dropping 50 meg on my system to push a glorified notepad is just not going to happen. The one bit of luck in my case is that it's Gnome specific but that doesn't mean similar unnecessary dependencies are not dumping in along side my KDE desktop. Hard drive space is cheap but that doesn't justify wasting it.

This is meant to be somewhat aside the specifics of Tomboy. Crippling hardware support (my Lenny dumps support for my HP server's NIC also.. booo!) and making extraneous crap a dependency just sucks. Great distro where applicable and I'm thankful for finally taking the time to explore and now use it but these things limit where it is the applicable correct choice for me.

I do admit that there may be reasons I'm not aware of though as I'm new to the Debian world.

Debian has always be the distro that split the KDE packages. Mandriva might have started to do the same, but to claim that installing Konsole install all of KDE is silly. Are you sure you are using Debian?

I just checked the dependencies of konsole is:
kdelibs, kdebase-runtime and Qt.

So you need the core KDE libraries, the core KDE runtime requirements and Qt to install konsole. You don't get any other KDE applications besides konsole.

With Mandriva, I urpmi in konsole specifically to inspire the minimum to run it and the drake tools. With Debian, it appeared that things like Konsole pulled in the KDE metapackage which included the entire KDE desktop. I'll toss up a few VMs later today and have a go at it though. I really would like to be using Debian as my desktop as it does other things far better than my current desktop distro; netdiscover consistently crashes out on Mandriva but works perfectly with Debian and similar things that make me run a Debian VM under Mandriva.

that's a drastic difference. I like when I'm wrong and learn stuff. Happy dance.. happy dance..

Now to confirm the wifi card support for my notebook assuming it's like the HP DL360's NIC; include firmware on flashdrive and let it get sucked in during install.

After that, it's just finding something close to the drake tools network connections manager and get my head around partitions.

Is there a prefered graphic wifi connection manager? The one's I've tried have been very esoteric; actually, the only way I've been successful is to hit wpa_supplicant.conf directly but that starts to suck when your regularily switching between AP.

Also, by partitions I mean that I've been spoiled by the drake tools graphic partition manager and am not yet comfortable enough with the Deb partition manager to cut disks up like I do for Mandriva. Probably just a matter of breaking a few VM installs until the fog clears though.

Unrelated; has anyone mounted Truecrypt partitions from a Linux liveCD? While it mitigates data loss from direct access to a machine, it also means decrypting the drive if something can't be fixed from within the Windows boot (work notebooks, no choice of regular staff OS).

But, I come from Mandriva where I can "urpmi konsole" and get only what is needed for KDE to push Konsole. The everything KDE (or Gnome) as a dependency of KDE (or Gnome) really turns me off as a result.

So
apt-get install konsole
instead of
apt-get install kde
problem solved. kde is a metapackage. If you don't want the whole thing, don't install the metapackage. Install the parts you want.

Although I'll aptitude it in, that's exactly what I'm trying to do and was sure that last time I had a go at a desktop install the metapackage got pulled as a dependency of the single package I'd asked for. My notebook is coming up for rebuild now that Lenny and 2009.1 are both out though so it's time to test again and see; be nice to run the same distro on the admin workstation as on the servers.

On Debian Squeeze Tomboy's package alone is over 13Mb not counting dependencies.

Interesting. Looks like it includes all debugging symbols (*.mdb), translations for about 50 different languages, and a help guide for 15 languages. The help guides includes the same 17 .png's for each of the 15 different languages.

10+ megs for a note-taking app, plus dependencies? Let me say, there were times not too long ago, when every living coder would've slapped the coder of that one in the face, and hard. But times, they are a'changing, now all I can do is choose not to use it, which is fine with me.

This whole thing smells like a hack to sneak mono into a default mono install with gnome, which - knowing we're talking about Debian here, my favourite from potato on - is quite peculiar. But then again, I use kde, so my only interest is because my Debian preference and my strong anti-mono feelings

I swear people like you are just sitting in a call center in india getting paid by microsoft to post lame anti-anti-mono crap.

You know, the blog post and everyone in this thread (and in the last mono thread) have been making good reasonable points except for the mono supporters. Only people like you are calling names (without argument) and dismissing the other side without any argument.

So no matter how much you try and paint them as anti-ms zealots, the reality is it isn't the anti-mono group that is acting like irrational zealots, it is the mono fans like you.

Seriously your post is so a-s-s hole-ish and off base. Did you actually read the blog post or any of the comments?? DO YOU EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH?? Or are you just copying and pasting rebuttals from a spreadsheet put together by MS's marketing/psychology department?

I'll repost an excerpt from my comment in the last thread because it seems even more appropriate here:

Why is it that most "mono haters" present reasoned arguments but mono supporters always reply with personal attacks and condescending dismissals? Not liking what you like doesn't make someone a zealot or a hater. Calling someone that when they've tried to engage in reasonable debate *does* make *you* a zealot and a hater however.

1) Mono "haters" *never* say mono sucks (although they do sometimes say it is slow which is true). They do sometimes ask the question, why do we need mono? For some reason though the reasonable and objective mono fans love to bring this up as if anyone was debating that anyway (this is known as a straw man argument, commonly used by irrational zealots to win arguments when they have no logical basis for their position)

2) Mono "haters" always bring up the fact that MS has patents on large portions of mono that have are *not* under ecma standardization. Reasonable mono fans always reply by saying that that mono is covered by ecma standardization and calling you a zealot (this is known as redirecting the question and not answering the question, also a favorite of zealots with no logical basis for their position)

3) Mono "haters" always bring up the fact that ecma standardization does not preclude MS from chargin RAND fees or requiring licensing. See 2) for response from fans.

I'll add for this particular case:

4) Mono "haters" ask why we need Tomboy when we have gnote that takes almost no space and is not controversial in any way? Mono "fans" reply with "rabble, flame, troll, hate, fud". (This again is known as not answering the question and redirecting the question in the form of character assassination).

Why is it that most "mono haters" present reasoned arguments but mono supporters always reply with personal attacks and condescending dismissals?

Do you really want to post that on your own post in which you said this:

Seriously your post is so a-s-s hole-ish and off base. Did you actually read the blog post or any of the comments?? DO YOU EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH?? Or are you just copying and pasting rebuttals from a spreadsheet put together by MS's marketing/psychology department?

Perhaps you would also like to post it on your above post where you opened with:

Omg that is so racist. I'm actually a game developer and long time linux user who is incredibly sick of pointless anti mono rubbish. But bringing ethnicity into this is really below the belt! I've made my pro mono arguements several times, and I'm over caring. But this kind of flame mongering should be above osnews

Racist? You really are insane. What percentage of the world speaks English? Saying someone doesn't appear to understand anything that is being said is not racist it is very possible in general based on language barriers. Just making a snide point that you may or may not speak english based on your previous post is not racist, it is just pointing out that you obviously didn't absorb one word of the blog post or anyone else's points.

Wow.

P.S.

5) Mono "haters" point out that mono fans don't appear to be listening or playing nice at all. Reasonable and calm mono fans accuse "haters" of being racist because the "hater" uses a random example of a country where some people may not speak English.

That's the racist part, when you make the inference that because his english might not be good that he works in a call center in India. Does that mean that anyone in India that doesn't speak proper English works in a call center? It couldn't possibly be a multi phd holding engineer. Its the equivalent of a non-english speaker assuming you must be a red neck moonshiner from Appalachia because your french sucks.

Well, if Tomboy is worth over 50Mb in the first cd then i want emacs there too, at around 70Mb the gtk version packs several mail and news readers, chat clients, file manager, image and document viewers, media players not to mention the editing and programming facilities, oh and it also has org-mode that beats the willies out of Tomboy, not to mention that it integrates with everything from calendar and address managers to web pages and files on disk. I don't mind a small app that i don't use like Gnote to be dragged in by Gnome automatically but I'll change to XFCE before i let some useless gadget install a complete virtual machine i don't like and don't use on my machines. What's next? Auto install a Fortran compiler so the calculator will work?

As Jo explained, we don’t even give a shit of what Mono is, it just happens to be a dependency for Tomboy.

Brilliant. The attitude appears to be "We'll just package any old crap and it's dependency tree, no matter how big, how much duplication it may cause, the space it may take up and the added complexity it will bring."

Amazing. It's like watching someone build a bookcase out of mashed potatoes.

Mono is a nice development environment which I used successfully for some projects.

Being afraid of patents isn't an argument in my opinion. There are patents everywhere, and in the case of mono the biggest part is even kinda protected because it is a part of the ecma standard. (And as a developer I have to say, that the non ecma part like System.Windows.Forms aren't attractive on linux anyway so you don't use them).

In a recent iTWire article titled "The elusive, royalty-free patent licence for Mono", Sam Varghese contacts Ecmea for the patent terms surrounding Mono. Remember that the mono camp always throws the argument at people that mono follows an Ecma standard and as such is free to implement?

Sam asked ECMA this simple question: "I also understand that the terms of use of these patents are royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory. I would be grateful if you could send me the details of the terms of the licence."

And gets a response: "ECMA does _NOT_ have anything to do with possible licensing of .NET. But Microsoft is one of our members, so I have asked them whom to contact there - if anything is needed, what I just do not know."

So, Sam moves on to contact Microsoft to ask them the same thing and throws in a question about moonlight's licensing too. His question was sent on April 28 and as the article states, he has not received any reply.

He reaches a very simple conclusion:
"To me, it looks this licence is as real as the unicorn. Or maybe Santa Claus. I think Mono fans need to think of a fresh defence when people talk about the dangers of patent suits arising over this technology. The licence talk has worn more than a little thin."

It's not 50MB. It's 5MB. Mono is much larger but it is an entire language and set of class libraries. Glibc is like 17MB so do you include that 17MB in the calculation of the size of every C application? I don't think so. The Boost libraries are 24MB but I have never heard anyone complain about their size. People making this argument have a hidden anti-Mono agenda. Every argument that seems to come out of the anti-Mono camp isn't an issue exclusive to Mono which makes me believe it is more of an anti-Microsoft viewpoint than any valid complaint about Mono specifically.

Glibc is like 17MB so do you include that 17MB in the calculation of the size of every C application?

glibc is (in practice) always there.

Every argument that seems to come out of the anti-Mono camp isn't an issue exclusive to Mono which makes me believe it is more of an anti-Microsoft viewpoint than any valid complaint about Mono specifically.

Of course it is. I don't think anyone tries to hide the fact that they are concerned about possible future popularity of Mono - i.e., people don't want to give the signal that it's now ok (or even recommended) to develop on Mono, because as it increases in popularity, the potential devastation caused by Microsoft pressing the "kill switch" (or, more probably, "quiet strangulation" switch) will be much larger.

I don't think we should be that badly concerned about this, though. As gnote proves, Mono apps that become successful can be ported to C++ with relative ease, and if C# environment can be used to attract developers to OSS development, so much the better. Think of it as a gateway drug ;-).

people don't want to give the signal that it's now ok (or even recommended) to develop on Mono, because as it increases in popularity, the potential devastation caused by Microsoft pressing the "kill switch" (or, more probably, "quiet strangulation" switch) will be much larger.

I understand this is one of the stated reasons but it doesn't make sense. Microsoft has as much power to "pull the plug" on any piece of FLOSS software as it does Mono.

As gnote proves, Mono apps that become successful can be ported to C++ with relative ease

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Tomboy is relatively simple as far as Mono applications go.

I don't see that. Mono is an implementation of "their" technology, while must of the other OSS stuff isn't.

That's a very shallow understanding of what is going on. The issue is patents. A re-implementation isn't subject to legal issues unless patents or copyright are involved. Microsoft has claimed patent rights on several pieces of software in the FLOSS world including the kernel itself. This isn't limited to Mono.

I don't see where the secret sauce with Mono apps is. They may be faster to develop, but in the end they are just Gtk apps, with no access to any magical libs that would not be available for C++.

The argument you made is that it would be easy to just port Mono apps. While it is possible it's not something that can be done overnight. Tomboy is relatively simple compared to apps like MonoDevelop and F-Spot. There are libraries that are not available in C++ because Mono has its own class libraries (although there are generally equivalent libraries available). You would probably have to inlcude some outside libraries in C++ implementations of more sophisticated Mono apps.

Microsoft has claimed patent rights on several pieces of software in the FLOSS world including the kernel itself. This isn't limited to Mono.

Perhaps it's just easier to "call bullshit" on the other claims of Microsoft, when they refer to technology not developed by them.

The argument you made is that it would be easy to just port Mono apps. While it is possible it's not something that can be done overnight. Tomboy is relatively simple compared to apps like MonoDevelop and F-Spot.

Perhaps it's just easier to "call bullshit" on the other claims of Microsoft, when they refer to technology not developed by them.

Perhaps it is in a discussion forum but not in a court of law. This is why I am re-iterating that this is a software patent issue in general not a Mono specific issue.

MonoDevelop is of course a redundant app for non-mono world.

I wouldn't agree. MonoDevelop is a very good IDE and supports many languages other than Mono.

So, I figure the porting will only get easier in the future. We might not hear of "line-by-line" port success stories of gnote, but the porting effort in itself doesn't seem insurmountable.

A big benefit to Mono over C++ is platform independence. Applications should be relatively simple to port to alternative architectures and operating systems as long as Mono itself is available for the platform. C++ is a built more complicated in that regard.

The original point I was trying to make is that just because a simple app like Tomboy was ported doesn't mean that it's going to be as easy to port more complicated programs.

So, I figure the porting will only get easier in the future. We might not hear of "line-by-line" port success stories of gnote, but the porting effort in itself doesn't seem insurmountable.

Redesign will be necessary for anything that makes use of reflection.

Also, wouldn't it be easier to write a compiler backend for Mono that outputs simple, portable C code? This fixes the portability issue, but not the size issue (CIL is smaller than the equivalent machine code in many cases); but if you have a framework that you expect people to use, you may as well bite the bullet.

Mono is patent encumbered software and Microsoft sooner or later will react against it, they don't like Open Source to build outside Windows, if you think they do you are just being too naive. I'm sure they are just waiting for Mono to grow more so they can attack it on the right time to produce massive loses.

Parrot is a much better alternative and much better technology anyway.

Other parts of Mono, such as Windows.forms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET are based on Microsoft proprietary technologies which are NOT any kind of standard at all, and which have NO Open Specification Promise, and which AFAIK are patented technologies.

PS: Having gone off Ubuntu and now Debian, I have just installed Fedora 11 KDE version. Very nice indeed. Ultra speedy. GTK applications look OK with no extra tweaking. Firefox 3.5 beta 4. I have even installed gnash 0.85 instead of Adobe's flash plugin, and it works a treat.

Well you're just rehashing old ground and spreading FUD. Mono is no more patent encumbered than Parrot. 8 years of being around without even a vague hint that Microsoft considers Mono to encroach on its patents (and Microsoft needs Mono) is a record that speaks for itself - and Mono may encroach on patents from another firm, as may any product or library you rely on.

Well you're just rehashing old ground and spreading FUD. Mono is no more patent encumbered than Parrot. 8 years of being around without even a vague hint that Microsoft considers Mono to encroach on its patents (and Microsoft needs Mono) is a record that speaks for itself - and Mono may encroach on patents from another firm, as may any product or library you rely on.

Novell and Microsoft made a deal worth many millions on the basis that "we won't sue your customers as long as you won't sue ours".

Novell Netware was "the original" LAN networking product. Novell must have many very valuable-to-Microsoft patents in that arena alone.

So what was it on Microsoft's side of this deal, that Novell are visibly working on now, that Novell felt that Microsoft could possibly have sued Novell's customers over (before the deal)?

As for the other libraries and possible patent infringements ... name some. Linux design is based heavily on POSIX standards and being a work-alike for Unix. The ideas within Linux internals are quite a bit older than the duration of patents ... and most of the technology was owned by the likes of IBM and Novell anyway.

PS: Besides, my claims on parts of the .NET technologies (namely Windows.forms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET) was that these parts of .NET are:
(a) implemented within current versions of Mono,
(b) are not ECMA standards, and
(c) are not covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (unlike, say, C#).

3) still give option to people to use it by including it in multiverse/non-free

[...]

Am I being unreasonable?

With that last point I would say so.

Mono is, after all, Free Software. Their authors grant you all the rights^W freedoms that the FSF require for software to bear the title. That there is the nebulous threat of lawsuits from third parties towards the users or implementors of Mono is another thing, but Linux itself was under threat and its status as Free software was never questioned.

I don't know, but if I were one of the authors I would be pissed if someone excluded me from the community and called my hard, GPL'd work 'proprietary' on a whim.

I don't know, but if I were one of the authors I would be pissed if someone excluded me from the community and called my hard, GPL'd work 'proprietary' on a whim.

Well said, I agree entirely. And I would be especially and seriously pissed off, if the guys attempting to redefine what is Free Software and what tools developers should use weren't even developers themselves. It's a bit like some people who are illiterate telling authors what sort of books they should be writing. Outrageous, and not any more acceptable just because a large and vocal minority behave like that.

Luckily, at this stage of the FOSS and OSS development community, there is no single entity that can control the field, neither politically nor technically.

I am happy to see the relative decline of the political side of the movement and organizations that push their political agendas to the technical development community, who most of the time couldn't care less about ideology.

Without the philosophical and political movement, would we have the freedom to start all this at the first place?

Umm, you're suggesting the Richard Stallman wasn't a programmer when he started the Free Software GNU project? And that the Free Software movement, given its name, isn't mainly about writing software based on the four kinds of freedom outlined in the Free Software definition?

Richard Stallman had practical problems to solve, caused by not having access to the source code of a printer driver or a Lisp development system for instance, and decided it was a major problem in general. He didn't get philosophical first.

I don't care about patent threats like being sued for using Mono or Moonlight. That would trigger the "patent world war" and yadda yadda, blah blah...

Seriously, that is NOT the point. I fear the scenario where Microsoft decides to license it much more than I fear the one where they decide to sue us.

If Microsoft were to start charging, say, US$ 0.10 for each installed instance of software that uses concepts patented by them, that would most likely not hurt the proprietary world who use .Net at all, but it would screw any Open Source System based on it.

I don't care if Tomboy uses Mono, I just won't use it. F-Spot? To hell with it, not going to worry. I start to worry about things like Gnome-Do.

Great Technology! The features are quite nice, and there seems to be some ideas forming about having it becoming the default interface for Gnome in a not-so-near-future (or did I get that wrong from possible Gnome 3.0 roadmaps?)

Because, the day a major Desktop like GNOME start having a core dependency on software that relies on a patent Microsoft controls, I'd bet they'd, not pull the plug, but simply regularize the situation and charge a symbolic fee on the patent licensing.

Hell, either that or they're angels. Because I'm sure as hell I would do it. If my competitor{,s} base{s,} a major part of {it's,their} product on technology I control and they can't afford to pay *any* licensing fee, I'd charge the smallest possible to make sure my partners are not screwed, and just watch the chaos, because if Gnome-related companies pay, MS wins, if they don't pay, MS wins too.

Edit to add a little bit more clarity to the post. And please excuse possible mistakes. My Spellchecker is not working and English is definitely not a native language for me. And the grammar errors? Well, I just have to learn more

You did get that wrong. The GNOME 3.0 Shell is based on JavaScript and GObjectIntrospection.

Hey, thanks for the information! I'm actually very relieved now. I'm not a GNOME User, but I use Gtk+ as my widget set of choice and I'm sure it would take a severe blow if the GNOME Community went through turbulent times because, having to rewrite major portions of it's desktop.

I wish I could mod you informative.

Anywyas, now I just hope they'll end up throwing a good FAST Javascript engine to the game, and I'll be just happy.

Although I would prefer if someone simply wrote a front end to CSharp's Standardized language to, say, parrot, just so we could port C#+Gtk# apps without relying on any piece of .Net technology other than the language grammar.

Good lord, if people are not bitching, moaning, and fighting about Linux vs Microsoft vs OSX vs BSD vs etc, now there is Mono vs anti-Mono?

Don't like Mono? Don't install it
Like Mono? Install it
Like developing with Mono? Use it
Don't like developing with Mono? Don't use it.

It really is that simple, yet it seems people would rather mindlessly get worked up about something so trivial and meaningless as this. If you really do not like something, then just use something else. I really do not understand this fanboyism that causes people to get so emotional about something so utterly stupid.

This kind of banality, social skills of teenager, lack of vision and highly dialectic view of world are all very typical characteristics of the FOSS world, fostered by anonymity and public forums of the internet.

Personally I think this is especially evident among the Linux evangelists. For so many of these believers, who typically are not developers nor stake holders, Linux is something abstract; something that needs to "win" at the cost of some other abstraction that needs to "lose". The history of GNU is one big "us vs. them". Reminds of Bush or the great ideological blocks during the cold war era.

Good lord, if people are not bitching, moaning, and fighting about Linux vs Microsoft vs OSX vs BSD vs etc, now there is Mono vs anti-Mono?

Don't like Mono? Don't install it. . .

All that is fine and I would agree, but that is NOTwhat this is about. The article is about mono being included by DEFAULT. Problem is that you can't just remove mono and the associated apps as this will cause problems when doing updates due to a meta package being missing.

It is pretty much a given that there is some question as to Mono and patents, at least in the US. MS seems to suggest that it has some "IP" associated with it as it entered into a patent sharing contract with Novel. MS won't clarify the issue. Based on that alone it seems foolish to include this software by default.

How hard it is to install this mono encumber software after the base desktop is installed? It isn't . . . so why would it be necessary to include it in the base. If it is so important put a big flag on the default desktop about how to install it, problem solved and I don't have to worry about mono.

It seems like an easy answer to me.

BTW I don't want mono installed by default, it just encourages the use of it for projects. IF MS comes out and puts it in writing that mono is not patent/IP encumbered I don't have a problem using it. Although, it does seem rather bloated as is the usual with anything associated with MS. 8^)

Okay, have it installed by default, but don't have the giant meta-package depend on it. That way, if the vast majority of people don't care, they get the benefits, but if you care and want to get rid of the offending code, you can do that easily, without major breakage.

Please, remove the remark about mono is hundreds times faster than Python. That is a false. Python is not the king of speed but no language I know is hundreds times faster than it. Believe me.

The C - ATT comment is erroneous too, but others has well explained that to you.

Think about that:

The problem is not only about MS. There are at least two other well known packages based in MS technologies:
wine and samba.

I read things about not to use them because is based is evil technology and blah blah blah. That is, in the Linux camp, there are anti-wine people and anti-samba people too. But as far as I know, the number of anti-mono people is much greater, and we are speaking here about the same people in al three cases.

Why mono has so bad reaction compared to the others?.

First, wine is about windows API replication and samba is a smb/cifs API to share files. Both of them, utilities of wide use in the computer world, and if Linux people want to get Windows people, almost everybody using that technology, that compatibility/replacement packages must exist in Linux too. wine will ever be behind Windows API, and samba will be behind cifs API, but that programs/utilities was widespread.

On the other side, how many users was using .NET technology when mono was announced?. Nobody was using that technology, and for me, that was a surprise. Mono is the first software that promise to be behind MS technology before that technology was created. Do not that tell something to you?. In that moment, a lot of Linux people told that was a non sense move, better was to try to replicate existing and emerging technologies like Java, but that was unacceptable because the mono proponents said Java was in Sun hands (BTW: Java is free now), and by my deduction, appear better to be in MS hands . There is no common sense.

Second is the fact wine and samba are for user consumption, but .NET/mono are for developers too. I can understand to be behind in some utilities, but in development tools too?. If you think that, you are plain wrong from my point of view. I use Linux not because is free, is because is **better**, simple as that. I don't want crap at any cost nor expensive nor free.

Third is patent appear not be problem for you, but is a big problem for me. I don't want a company being sued because some MS patent problem, or the system crash because the new version is not API compatible. All because I don't choose the correct tools. Okay, I can change the problematic part whatever that be but anyway, will be my fault and I will be responsible. Is bad idea to go in life finding problems, unfortunately problems comes to you without your help. Only sit and wait.

I am Fedora user, but from Fedora 11, mono is optional, that avoid to worry me removing it, that is the first thing I usually do after installation."

My personal problem with Samba stems directly from CIFS; clear text protocol. Why does Windows still spray my user password hash across the network like this? While your grabbing your important document or sending your print job, anyone on the network can grab your login info and start working on it. Granted, complicated passwords make breaking the PreAth but the fact that I can get that information still already created security problems at home and work.

Thanks to a lack of support for ssh and sshfs on the Windows side (I think it's the only OS that doesn't offer support still), it's not even a choice. All my other platforms integrate safely on the network but I have to jump through hoops to come close to that same security as soon as Windows is involved.

I think the difference between the three though is this; WINE and Samba provide a function. Mono is a .net clone. It's a programming framework for the Studio.net folk.

Unlike Samba, I don't have personal investment in Mono or Gnome so I'm a third party observer on this one.

The big problem I see here is that Mono for all intents and purposes is being pushed mostly by Novell.

Most of the major developers for the Gnome project also work for Novell.

Novell managed to get Tomboy to become a part of Gnome's official application list, just as Epiphany is the official Web Browser of Gnome.

Personally, I find the sticky notes in Gnome-applets to be sufficient most of the time anyhow. So why this discussion between Gnote and Tomboy being included is even around is beyond me. I do agree though that it's pretty stupid to have a framework installed for just ONE freaking app. It would be the same as if Ubuntu wanted to include Google Earth in their standard distribution, so they'd have to include all the QT libraries.

Or of Kubuntu wanted to have Brasero included in it. Forget the stupidity that k3b is still superior, but all the extra gnome-libs would be absolutely stupid to have along with it.

This is regardless of the whole 'mono sucks' and 'mono doesn't suck' argument.

Case in point, WTF Debian? Not that I generally use Debian as a desktop OS, but STILL! Well, Squeeze is quite a ways off from being released, so I am sure this will be resolved once Gnote is properly finished and released.

There is no default install of Debian, or a default desktop. During the install there is a choice for tasks you wish to install. I guess what the article means is that Mono is now a dependency of the GNOME Destkop task.